A long time ago, toward the beginning of my career, I actually
learned something, from a book reviewer, that I hadn't realized about
myself.

The review covered both The Probability Broach and The Venus
Belt, and the reviewer was describing my popular character Lucille
Gallegos Kropotkin, whom she said "hates government and loves
politics". All at once, I knew that I had created an autobiographical
character without intending to, and that Lucy was me, with the brakes
off.

Much more recently, I've noticed that many of my books are about a
frontier. Having a frontier is very good for a countryfor an
entire civilizationin many ways. The fact that America once had a
frontier is one of the things that made her great, The fact that she
no longer has a frontier is one of the things that are destroying her
now.

But what I suddenly noticed about my worklast Thursday if I
recall correctlyis that in none of them are the frontiers I
described being wrenched from the hands of somebody who was there
first.

Interesting.

To me, anyway.

For as long as there have been Homo sapiensand, for all we
know, long before thatthere have been frontiers and fighting. It
seems the grass is always greener on the other guy's side of the
fence. (My wife points out that the idea of a fence presumes another
guy.)

In Europe, the word "frontier" means something different than it
does in the United States. Here, it means the edge of civilization,
the beginning of the untrodden and unknown. There, it simply means
"border".

There is probably a reason for this.

Among primitive people, their name for themselves usually means
"the people", implying that outsiders are something less. To the
Sumerians, the Greeks, the Persians, and so on, who were usually not
much better armed than the others they were trying to conquer, the
frontier was simply synonymous with the front lines of the ongoing
battle.

That meaning began to shift a little with the Romans, especially
in northern Europe and Britain, where there were significant gaps in
technology and organization between the would-be conquerors and their
intended victims. But the real change occurred when Europeans came to
America, bringing horses, guns, and steeland the experience of
centuries of continental warfareto bear against wooden and stone
weapons.

With a possible exception of the Aztecs and Peruvians, who worked
wonders with the materials at hand, knew how to organize themselves
efficiently, and were accustomed to fighting continuous large-scale
wars with their neighbors or among themselves, the peoples that the
Spanish, French, Dutch, and British discovered here, for the most
part, weren't seen as rival human beings to be conquered, but ethical
nonentities, dangerous, inedible wildlife, which, like all the trees
standing in the way of progress, should be swept aside and disposed
of.

This situation, and the outlook that came with it, was exacerbated
by the dominant religious opinion that entities who not only weren't
Christians, but actually had the temerity to worship in whatever way
they wished, deserved no humane consideration. This was exactly the
same mindset that had made the Crusades possible. Those who hadn't yet
been washed in the blood of the Lamb were to be washed in their own,
instead.

In fairness, it needs to be pointed out here that Europeans were
far from monolithic in their views concerning Indians. (Understand
that there are no "native Americans"; increasingly it appears that the
first humans to settle on this continent were French cavemen, almost
25,000 years ago; the ancestors of Sequoia, Crazy Horse, Osceola,
Sitting Bull, and Jay Silverheels came here from northeast Asia 10,000
years later.) The first anti-slavery organization was created by Queen
Isabella of Spain (not a nice person in any other respect), when she
was shown the miserable, dying creatures Columbus had brought home as
slaves.

Americans inherited their ideas about Indians from their European
ancestors, and redefined the concept of the frontier, themselves. It
was a five-step process: (1) lay claim to a newly-discovered piece of
land; (2) run the Indians off or kill them; (3) cut down all the
trees; (4) build a house out of some of them; and (5) put a plow in
the ground. When the Westward Movement collided with the Grand
Prairie, (3) got easier, and (4) meant building your house out of sod,
while (2) became much harder, especially once the Indians had acquired
horses.

Thus, from the late 15th century into the early 20th, "frontier"
gradually came to mean the boundary between the white and Indian
territories. My question is, had there been no Indians living in North
America, would there have been a frontier or any motivation to conquer
it? Do people need somebody to fight them for something before it
acquires sufficient value to them, be it the Holy Grail or Black Hills
gold?

Today, whenever individuals try to imagine future frontiers, there
are usually surogate Indians to fight, be they Klingons, Ewoks, or
those blue people from Avatar so very popular in online porn. The
days are gone when such a struggle, between primitive and advanced
cultures, can be made to seem virtuous. But that's a good thing for
Hollywood writers, who can drag us into the theaters with promises of
glorious blood and guts, and then make the winners feel guilty about
it.

I confess that I haven't seen Avatar. Knowing the work of Steven
Spielberg as I do, I'm not about to spend ten or twelve dollars to sit
and be lectured by a liberal hypocrite and liar for the crime of being
human and enjoying high-tech capitalism. Besides, the trailers looked
way too much like that other repulsive exercise in self-loathing,
Pocahontas.

But I have digressed.

While the question remains open just a tiny crack, it appears that
with the exception of the planet we're standing on, there is no other
sapient life the in Solar System. There is almost certainly life,
possibly in abundance, under the ice of Europa, or in the clouds of
the gas giants, but nothing that could play checkers with you, or tell
a dirty joke.

No checkers, no dirty jokes, no Indians. Will people be interested
in a frontier like that, or will they find it boring and not worth the
effort?

As I've said on more than one occasion, if you're interested in
landing on, colonizing, settling, and especially terraforming Mars,
you'd better hope there isn't any life there, not even bacteria. The
nanosecond word gets out about that, all the tree-huggers will become
bug-huggers, and do everything they can to prevent their own species
from possessing (and in their demented view, destroying) a second
planet.

It seems the left has exactly the same ethical problem as the
right: neither side is willing to investigate the differences between
non-sapience and sapience. So we get the "Right to Life" movement, and
PETA.

In my novel The Venus Belt, I described a project in which an
asteroid was to be accelerated in its orbit around the sun, to a
respectable fraction of the speed of light, so it could be deflected
into the path of Venus, converting that otherwise useless planet into
a new asteroid belt, full of easily-extracted minerals and other
materials, and new dwelling places for the more adventurous minds from
Earth.

Notice that not a single Indian was injured or killed in the
production of this novel, although I received a ration of excrement
for blowing up a whole (gasp!) world! Maybe the elevation of Gaia to
goddesshood was contagious. Maybe there are too damn many C.S, Lewis
fans out there. (Don't see it, myself.) I don't know about my critics,
but I belong to a species who will repair their sun when it goes bad,
so I don't care very much about one little ball of rock and poison
gas.

I also described the first fully terraformed Old Belt asteroid,
Ceres, complete with all the features of my later asteroid novels, and
a city in its core with architecture based on the artwork of M.C.
Escher.

I seem to write a lot about asteroids. I've been fascinated by
them since I first read Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince
and I love islands for many of the same reasons. Good things happen in
such places. In Bretta Martyn I have Robretta Islay nail a thinly-
disguised Charles Schumer to the wall through his eye-socket, using a
crossbow.

My first serious encounter with asteroids was my novel Pallas,
which is about people living on the asteroid of that name, the second
largest in the Belt. The reader gets to see in some detail the several
arduous steps by which a planetoid is terraformed (apparently it's
practical; I'm often askedby engineersif I'm an engineer),
what that engineering achievementand the individual freedom that
flowed from itmean to them, and how threats to it, mostly natural,
are dealt with. While there is a nasty villain and a power struggle,
Pallas was a barren rock before people got there and there are no
Indians.

Ceres centers around the terraformation of the largest of the
asteroidsit has the same surface area as Indiaagain nothing
more than a barren rock before human beings came to "despoil" it, and
again, a frontier with no Indians to fight, although there are some
pretty nasty environmentalists that have to be dealt with the hard
way.

So, at least in the universes I've created, you can indeed have a
frontier without fightingIndians or their surrogates, at least.
The prospect excites me more than fighting Indians would. My question
is, what do you think about that, and what do you believe others
think?